My older sister was named for my great-grandmother. My younger sibling’s name was pulled from thin air. I was named after my mother’s favourite character in a book written over a century ago. I suppose that’s the heart of it.  

Gertrude Stein said, “call anybody Paul and they get to be Paul call anybody Alice and they get to be Alice perhaps yes perhaps no.”1 Denise Riley wrote, “my name is sheer ‘extimacy.’ And it’s something that I pull inside me to make it mine.”2 Give anybody a name and they will make that name who they are – 

INTERLUDE

It goes like this: every Ella I’ve ever met has been polite and well-spoken and smiled like sunshine and smelt like sugar cookies; every Emma I’ve met has had a sour turn of lip, a tendency towards mean words and actions. Every Ben I know is soft inside and out, hard-shell hard-won; every Craig reminds me of eroding cliff edge. All tried so hard to be good. I have never met another Teddy; I will be my first. 

– does the name make the person or does the person make the name? Sometimes, I only understand someone by their name – Ryan, Caitlin, or Eden – because no other name work. Effortless embodiment of name. Conversely, sometimes a face can fit a thousand names; I know a Kate who could be Freya, or Sam. And while, yes, a rose by any other name might not smell as sweet and, yes, the name a parent gives to a child is a life-long wound, we keep going. We keep forming ourselves around these words, these ways of understanding.  

Somewhere, a realisation: my whole personality will be pockmarked by the fact I am called Moira. Children turn their noses up at Maude in the playground, whose name stitches her to hand-hemmed aprons. Names carry connotations as much as any other word. But aren’t we made up of the things we aren’t, too? The things we almost were? Maybe Maude was almost Rebecca – how different a life as Rebecca would be. Maybe Moira was almost Grace – oh, to live with the harmony of the name that is Grace. 

When I am born, I am nearly a Jo Meg, after the eldest March sisters in Little Women. Imagine the horror, the playground tragedy; a not-quite-girl with a name made for climbing trees and ripping open trouser knees, middle name ripe for cracking open and scooping the innards out of. A laughingstock. And while Jo’s fierce passion will always be admirable, and Meg's loyalty to family lovable, I would not have been me. I would have been someone else entirely as Jo Meg. I believe wholeheartedly that this ‘almost’ curls concave to my actuality, holds reality snug to its imagined belly. I am not a Jo Meg, because I was Beth Amy instead. The family darling and the family death. (When I am young and I read the book for the first time, I extrapolate two things from my namesakes: that I am destined to be a snotty brat, and that I am destined to die young. Both things very nearly happen.) I become the homeliest of three children, the quietest, the one most like my Marmee; I become a painter, a poet. I am shaped by the book with my almost- and actual- names before I even hold the pages in my hands.  

The first book I remember being mine – really, truly mine, down to the bone – was given to me by a man who thought he was Jesus, reincarnated. In my mind’s eye, the outstretched hand bearing the present appears from above like the arm of God, tanned wrist peeking out of pearlescent clouds. 

The cover of the book is fashioned after the film adaption. A girl dressed in blue, curls of hair like copper coins, stepping through a golden door. In my memory, I snatch at the novel – I am entranced. I am still telling myself (at this point) that I am a girl and that liking girls is okay if it’s only for their looks and that if I pray hard enough God will let it all slide.  

The book is called The Little White Horse. It promises adventure and intrigue – it delivers. It hangs in the balance somewhere between magic realism and religious symbolism. The main character is called Maria – as in Mary, the virgin – the Immaculate Mother. She is bold

and  
red-headed 
and
saving the world 
and

her faith is astounding. I find comfort in descriptions of carved pews and cursed places. I find comfort in their faith in goodness. 

I haven’t picked up that book since I was thirteen, but the spine is cracked and broken enough you’d think it had saved my life. 

I chose my name at eighteen. I did not whisper it aloud until I was twenty-one. I did not beg the people I love to refer to me by the name I felt was mine. I was afraid they would not love me the same. Because it was not the name I was given when I crawled out of the womb screaming, not the name everybody else saw, the sticky label on my jumper when I first went to school. It was my name which had lingered, simmering, in the pit of my stomach since childhood, my name, indecipherable until I learnt the language. How could I ask people to call me that which was not my name without seeking attention? 

INTERLUDE II 

I am a writer who wants to learn how to interrogate their own thinking. Why do I think the way I do? Why am I the person that I am? I am a tangle of DNA. A constellation of thought and feeling and language stolen from others. 

Melissa Febos talks about her connection to her own name in Girlhood – the soft ribbon of the ‘s,’ the refreshing gasp of the ‘a.’ She said she would never be done with Melissa; at odds, I think I am done with Beth – the rounded opening sound, the hissing conclusion – but it will never be done with me. That sticky label went through the wash with the jumper, turned tacky and dark with the wool. I can cover it with a new label – the label I feel is more mine – but it will always linger in the stitches of this sweater. Out with the sweater and out with the name, though, yes? 

Oh, no.  
We’re not quite there yet.